


eggshell white

by asynchrony



Series: all my armor [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Concussions, Eggs, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Timeskip, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29305632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asynchrony/pseuds/asynchrony
Summary: The body has a thousand defense mechanisms, Tobio discovers.for HQ jukebox round 1:humpty
Relationships: Kageyama Tobio/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Series: all my armor [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2159196
Comments: 17
Kudos: 31
Collections: Haikyuu Writer Jukebox Round One - Mitski





	eggshell white

**Author's Note:**

> hit that "hide creator's style" button if you don't like monospace fonts.
> 
> warnings: potentially uncomfortable descriptions of bodies and food; themes of dissociation, bodily autonomy, unreality; mention of animal death.
> 
> playlist on spotify [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3kvySRBgUdTjlbdstU4Zpt?si=d5384c7353624b68).

_the rib is the shell and the heart is the yolk  
and i just made a meal for us both to choke on  
every single night's a fight  
with my brain_

  


The chew of meat makes his stomach turn, now. Sinew between his teeth reminds him that he is, after all, constructed from soft tissue, destructible and easy to harm.

But he is made of flesh, and he has to maintain it.

One hundred grams of protein, his team’s nutritionist had said, at the very least. Even during the holidays. Even when things are hard. One-fifty, if you can.

One egg has approximately thirteen grams of protein, so Tobio cooks eight every day. Cooks them, no yolk to pressure into unwilling surrender, no albumen sweat-sticky between grains of rice. Tamago kake gohan coats his throat and makes him tremble. It is not his favorite, anyway, not his.

* * *

_scrambled , in the morning; butter for fat, pre-sliced whole-wheat bread. he tries a tomato once, then remembers the ventricles of the heart in its cross-section._

Four eggs in a saucepan, diced butter like Tobio saw once in a video of a famous British chef. Stirred, until the butter melts; until the egg emulsifies; until it all comes together.

He lines the eggshells up on his windowsill. From the side, their jagged edges look like mountaintops. Pictures a tiny someone, jumping from height to height. Pictures himself, eggshell-fragile, crumbling under the weight.

Tobio doesn’t like that, so he stands, instead. Surveys them from above, hollowed out. Spider’s silk membrane holding them together in imperfect halves. Kintsugi, one might say: cracks filled in with gold to make a whole. But the membrane was holding them whole, before, and now, and now, and now.

(Isn’t that the terror of living, the now?)

* * *

_medium-boiled with ramen , in the evening; just overdone enough that yolk doesn’t seep like a wound into his broth._

The body has a thousand defense mechanisms, Tobio discovers.

He slips his feet into a bath a little too hot and watches them grow red and heavy and sluggish. Submerges the rest of him, plucked and poaching in his own liquids. Hair fanning out above like fat to the surface, ready to skim.

Underwater, the roaring of the world quiets to his heartbeat, pounding in his ears. Tobio opens his eyes to the wavering reassurance of the tiles on the other side. If he moves his feet just a little, he can feel the solid marriages of right angles that are the corners by the tap. The porcelain remains impassive. Lines vertical and horizontal, precise despite the fallibility of his human eyes, his human touch. He could stay here forever.

Eventually, without his consent, his limbs thrash him to the surface. Tobio gasps. His lungs struggle under the weight of an absent foe. Sits up, except the air rushing in to save him reminds him of everything else he has ever let in.

The floor is wet. His face is wet. His teeth, silken bones stored in the crevices of his skull before he was old enough for the knowledge of them, have always been wet.

* * *

_fried , sometimes. the days he has lunch are a blessing and a curse. lips, teeth, tongue. the way swallowing is a guilty convulsion that ripples through his throat._

Tobio lets his jaw rust over. The hinge tugs the thousand tendons in his neck, face, jaw; his body has let him chain it shut, and he intends to honor it.

His name begins with a plosive. A voiceless one, created by making his tongue so big in the back of his mouth that it touches his soft palate, that no air can get through. _ka-ge-ya-ma to-bi-o_. Seven syllables, and the first sounds like choking.

These days, his neck is corded with muscle, brain stem and tendons and spine an elaborate series of pulleys which puppet his limbs. Tobio looks at himself in the mirror and imagines a smaller boy whose shoulders end where his traps do, climbing out of this adult skin.

He scrapes the corrosion off his chin like residue off a pan. He cannot bring himself to be cruel to his fingers, even now. Calluses are defensive after all.

* * *

_omurice. rickety stools, chatter like the headachey hum of a power transformer. knees pressed to reassuring wood as the knife disembowels the omelette in one smooth stroke._

Wakatoshi coaxes him out, once. It is worrying that it is him. It is more worrying, still, that the rest of the team watch them with nothing Tobio knows how to read in their eyes. Nobody makes an attempt to invite themselves, or asks to join.

Still. It is because it is Wakatoshi, and just Wakatoshi, that he says yes. Finds himself seated at a chabudai so low that they both have to use their athlete's flexibility to fit their knees under it. Tobio’s back is to the wall, and he is thankful, line of sight to the door even in the screen-partitioned upstairs dining room.

There are no eyes on them, only a tablet to place orders from. Tobio fumbles for the safety of egg and rice.

Wakatoshi has grown observant since high school. Adds edamame, fried tofu; iced oolong tea, no umeshu. Tonkotsu ramen for himself, extra eggs on the side.

“To share,” Wakatoshi says. “My treat”, Wakatoshi says.

“Itadakimasu,” Wakatoshi says.

On the tiny television mounted in the corner above the door, a man is standing on two cartons of eggs. He picks up one woman, then another. The eggshells do not surrender. The steam from Tobio’s plate curls moist and warm past his face.

* * *

_tamago hosomaki , like individual vertebrae._

Nori is, after all, a skin. Tobio zips himself into his own, pulls kneepads on and thinks about kneecaps floating like lost pieces of shell.

Not quite, not quite. Like a yolk, perhaps, tethered by stringy chalazae to either side of a shell. Connected and discrete.

If asked, he's sure his coach would say his performance has been adequate. He is a good setter, gifted; precision comes easier to him than eating does, these days. He pays attention to his team. He uses everything he's learned.

Tobio knows they worry, in furtive locker room glances and whispers rapidly abandoned whenever he approaches. He understands why. He can't quite bring himself to follow the thought to its logical end. The eggs on his counter were never meant to hatch.

Wakatoshi is the same as always, some small relief. Remains predictable, on the court and off. Reliable. Years ago, the reputation and dreams of an entire school fit compacted under his skin. Tobio isn't sure what's there now. Picks at the loose end of a poorly-sealed roll, where the nori has stayed too stubborn to lay close to itself. Thinks about unspooling every piece into its tidy components.

No matter. He is old enough now to know that he cannot do that, not to people. Wonders if anyone knows, really, what has been done to him.

* * *

_soft-boiled. soy sauce like the night around the glow of a single street lamp. the watery outer egg white is swallowed in its maw._

The way the white trembles is almost repulsive. Barely opaque, like the sclera of an eye removed from its socket. Tobio tests it gently with his spoon.

He has learned to be gentle. Learned it all over again, though he is unsure he ever learned it completely the first time around. The bloody mass where he'd bitten through his cheek is finally beginning to heal.

Water, boiling, poured over the defenseless egg. Ceramic lid replaced. He waits five minutes, or maybe ten, or however long it takes for his eyes to cross-uncross-cross-uncross like his physiotherapist says they shouldn't. The word for surrender cuts off his throat the same way his name does, an ugly sound. _Kōfuku_ , long o like an animal in pain.

His grandfather had liked his eggs this way. "You have to be very, very still," he'd said. "Leave the egg to slowly cook on its own."

Tobio wasn't still then, but he is now. Marking time like a metronome of heartbeat and breath.

(A metronome, and not a clock; keeping time, without having it.)

* * *

_chawanmushi , delicate in flavor and composition, wobbles ever-so-slightly in its bowl. teetering on the edge of some precipice._

Tobio likes it when it's cold. He remembers that he did, anyway. Winter felt like a just reward for enduring the glass-lidded humidity of summer. Chawanmushi, though, he likes in summer, served cold and fragile and nothing at all reminiscent of life. Slippery enough that, if he needs, he hardly has to taste it at all.

It feels like giving up, eating like this. Feels like surrendering the rest of his life instead of just seconds-minutes-hours. Tobio doesn't know how to stop. The cassette has been cracked open, tape trampled like so many entrails, and he can't seem to figure out how to wind himself back into a well-oiled machine.

"He's always been a bit aloof," he hears a teammate tell a newer recruit spending their first away game on the bench. How strange, to look at him through frosted glass, and see something hearty and deliberate. To look at the dish, cold and quaking in the bowl it was cooked in, and see something thrumming with life.

When Tobio returns to his hotel room, he methodically destroys everything in the minibar. Finds himself trembling, indeed, stomach heaving in a way it had just begun to forget. He stares at the wreckage and is struck by the figure he can faintly make out in the dark, mirrored in the wardrobe door across the room: a miserable shell of a man, broad-shouldered and sharp-jawed and powerfully built, curled into himself on compliant knees like a child or a woman who knows there is no escape.

* * *

_raw._

Is it not enough that he has to carry the entire shuddering mass of viscera that people see as him everywhere he goes? That he has to manipulate it into functioning at something close to its peak, even when every instinct tells him to sever himself from it? That people look at him and think, _oh, there is a healthy man with a body which does not betray him_?

"We don't have the budget, you understand," their manager says, as apologetically as possible. Tobio _does_ understand, which is the worst thing. He hates walking the tightrope where sponsors and auditors still muse about his talent, but wonder if he's a liability.

"I'll share a room with Ushijima, then." Remembers his manners. "I really am sorry about the trouble last time."

The open pity and curiosity on her face is hard to bear, so he turns away before she can reassure him.

She cannot reassure him. Tobio rolls over and finds himself positioned by invisible forces. Thrashes and screams, except his vocal cords have been neatly trimmed away, his movements restricted beneath the heavy pot lid, steam pressing up like his peeling hands and equally futile. Through the shrieking roil of boiling water he can faintly fear a voice, low and clotted with sleep, _Kageyama, Kageyama, Tobio._

Wakatoshi does not say anything ridiculous the next morning. He says nothing at all, in fact; looks as rested and placid as ever. That night, Wakatoshi presses a small bottle of dark glass into his hands on his way to the shower. At first Tobio bristles, thinking it a sedative, but he recognizes peppermint oil the moment he breaks the seal.

Tobio rolls over, and is rolled sweat-damp among chilled vegetables and the relentless fragrance of torn-edged mint. The rice paper, at least, is translucent enough to let the light in, and cool to the touch.

* * *

_with toast soldiers , embraced by a cup nearly as fragile and just as small. a spoon to fracture its crown._

As a teacher, Suga-san seems almost a caricature of his high school self. It's a little frightening to be here with him: this is one of the few people who paid close, close attention to what he was like before. This is someone who remembers him, aching and small in ways that built him into the person he's become, and hasn't been around to see him aching and small again.

Tobio wonders if he's a disappointment. Suga, glowing in paint-flecked plaid, is going on about the traditional Western breakfast and its lack of imagination — _not as vivid or appropriate a metaphor-name as oyakodon has, isn't it, Kageyama_ — but they both know full well that he's an observant man, under all the whimsy and the way he lets his train of thought run relatively unsupervised like a dog on a very generous leash.

He's not surprised, then, when Suga finishes his tale, and studies him with a familiar, astute eye.

"Daichi enrolled in the Police academy because of what happened to me, just after we graduated," Suga-san says, pleasant as discussing the weather. "It's... well. It's not the path I'd wanted for him, and it's not like it did _me_ any good."

Tobio's startled enough once the words process that he snaps his gaze from politely fixed between Sugawara's eyebrows to meet his.

"Ah," the older man says. "I thought so. I'm sorry."

"I didn't know. You didn't have to tell me that," Tobio manages. Something is crawling up his throat.

"I wanted to." Suga lowers his teacup, rueful but smiling. "It's like any other serious sprain, you know. It gets in your way no matter what you do. But take care of it, stretch it when it's ready, and it will heal."

Tobio sets his cup down too, but not before his unsteady hand chips it against the saucer.

* * *

_smashed with mayonnaise , in a sandwich cut by broad hands._

Muscle memory can be dangerous if you are taught wrong the first time. Tobio holds his lungs full with the force of his intercostals, straining between his ribs. His torso has been plastered across the papers, but it doesn't look like his.

A thought sends him padding silent into the kitchen. Wakatoshi is trimming crusts off white bread with a delicacy which belies the way his hands dwarf the knife. Tobio looks at his traps, his powerful back, and does not see a body at war or a child incarcerated in someone else's skin.

His friend turns, smiles in that half-grimace that he recognizes from the mirror.

"I've forgotten how to live. I've forgotten how to live. I've forgotten," Tobio's mouth repeats, a record looping in its final locked groove.

Wakatoshi takes a step forward, face ruffled with something like mild alarm. Tobio moves past him, absently taking his place. The knife is narrow with a serrated edge and a rounded end. It would take a long, long time for him to saw through skin, let alone sinew and bone, with a blade such as this.

"Kageyama," Wakatoshi says, uncertain.

"Tobio," Tobio says. "I've forgotten who he is." Knife loose in his left hand, he drifts. Wakatoshi stands carefully still. Lets him draw close, step distant and deliberate into his orbit.

"Tobio," Wakatoshi breathes, nearly inaudible even at a few inches' distance. "What do you need?"

Isn't that a question. "I've forgotten," Tobio says again. "How to trust my body. What it looks like, when it belongs to me."

Wakatoshi nods in impossible, implausible comprehension. His eyes dart to the knife for just a moment, then focus past Tobio's face in thought.

"We are not dissimilar, the two of us." He fidgets with the hem of his shirt like a man who hasn't grown up in locker rooms, and Tobio, too, begins to understand.

"Show me, then." He sets the knife down.

Tobio follows Wakatoshi to his room; hesitates at the door, before shutting it decisively behind them; presses himself into the chair as far from the bed as possible. Wakatoshi lingers in uncertainty a moment more, then sits on the edge of his bed. Takes his shirt off.

It's nothing Tobio hasn't seen before, but then again, he's never been the person he might be now. The slanted light of the half-shuttered window creeps across the breadth of Wakatoshi's collarbones, rippling with his breath.

Wakatoshi lets him look his fill. Sits, at ease in his skin if not relaxed, and looks at him in turn. His is a gaze which isn't heavy with judgement, or even pity. His is a body which obeys its resident. Tobio watches Wakatoshi's fingers flex on the edge of the bed, travels back up a chest just a little broader than his own, sparse hair fair enough to glint translucent in the fading sunlight.

When their eyes meet again, Wakatoshi shifts a little. "You can touch me, if you like."

It is because it is Wakatoshi, and only Wakatoshi, that Tobio doesn’t flee.

“No,” he says eventually. “Not this time.”

Wakatoshi’s eyes shine in the near-dusk with sudden warmth. “Whatever you need.”

* * *

_pickled. bobbing absently with garlic and chili. the moment of resistance before they yield to a spoon, acrid with vinegar._

Tobio finds himself underwater again. It's one of those inconveniences he never used to think about: the way that skin and oil and other fluids gather into a thoroughly regrettable mess, that needs cleaning no matter how little you move. How alien, the distance from the days when he'd shower mindlessly without shivering at his own touch, the sight of his miserable flesh.

Brine is sterilizing, at least. Tobio scrubs at himself until his skin is a continuous strip of dimpled rind. No further, no further. The pith beneath is bitter and fragile.

(To pith an animal is to destroy its brain, and thereby kill it. It feels no pain; its blood stays inside its body. It is easy to pin down and dissect, or to get rid of without contaminating everything it touches. Tobio remembers a distinct moment: hand in his hair, slamming his head back against a wall, the sickening sound of it like a pithing bolt driven home.)

At the sink, he stares into the mirror. Pulls the corners of his mouth into a rictus of a smile. Picks up his electric toothbrush and thinks about the way toothpaste can never be put back in, once you press the tube into giving it up; thinks about cattle prods; thinks about the mosquito-hum that fills his skull when he turns it on and the huge relief it is to be able to blame a machine for the way he gags every time he reaches his second molars.

 _I wouldn't want to be a dentist,_ Tobio remembers hearing a family friend say, a hundred years ago. _A thousand panicked eyes staring up at you._ He thinks he understands now. Eyes bulging, tongues sluggish, jaws stretched and aching, inhuman, inhuman, inhumane.

* * *

_hard-boiled and reluctant to let go of their shells._

Wakatoshi asks him to dinner again. It's become something he does, somewhat regularly; Tobio is more likely than not to say yes.

"No," Tobio says today. It's such a deceptively gentle word, easy to speak, but it binds his jaw nevertheless. Jaw tension is neck tension, is one of the surest signs you'll hurt yourself, next time you attempt the impossible as a national-calibre athlete is bound to do.

Wakatoshi nods, turns away. Tobio feels the loss immediately. Some dam inside him is bursting, and something else is fighting tooth and nail to contain it.

"Ask me again tomorrow?" he blurts.

Wakatoshi smiles, almost imperceptibly. "I will."

Like some kind of clairvoyant, Sugawara texts Tobio that night. It's nothing significant. A picture of a cat which looks like him, apparently, the Karasuno number-nine uniform haphazardly drawn on with blocky phone-editor scribbles. Looking at it transmutes Tobio into a being bubbling over with helpless desire.

 _Can I call you?_ , he texts, bold with today's new impulse. Before he can regret it, Suga is calling him instead.

"Of course, Kagayama, you just need to ask. What's up?"

The rolling boil slows to a simmer. "Asking," he says. "That's the problem. And Wakatoshi."

"Ushijima Wakatoshi? Our once-rival, your teammate?"

The story cascades from him in fits and bursts, a spiderweb of cracks, until his breath is galloping too quick for him to continue. "I don't understand," he manages. "I don't know why he—" _(feeds me, watches out for me, sits half-naked and vibrant and alive and invites me to touch him)_ "I don't know what to do."

Suga hums, the whistle of an infinitely gentle kettle. "It's good that you have him," he says. "It's good that you asked me about calling. Keep asking, until you know what you want, and who can help."

Somewhere, a timer has been ringing for minutes. Tobio remembers the grey-green of corpses and overcooked yolks and thinks better of it.

* * *

_pressure cooked : water underneath, heavy lid clamped shut, immense pressure for just a few minutes. these ones slip effortlessly out of their shells._

Reliable as always, Wakatoshi does ask him to dinner the next night. Tobio picks at what's left on his plate and sets his chopsticks down.

"I wanted to ask," he begins. A hundred flimsy justifications rise to his tongue, but he peels them apart. The imprecise cushioning of propriety has never been a problem between them. "Could I look at you again?"

It should feel ridiculous to ask and answer, but Wakatoshi only nods. Lets him trail behind him like a lost dog on the rain-chromed streets.

 _Not this time_ , Tobio remembers saying, and isn't that a promise. _Next time,_ people always think it means. He presses his palms, moist and weighted by his pulse, against his thighs. The points of the umbrella hem them in with bars of intermittent water.

The sound of Wakatoshi's door closing behind them is heavy and final. Wakatoshi peels his jacket off and hangs it on the back of the door, then turns to Tobio. "How do you want me?"

 _I don't_ , Tobio almost says, but that is a lie. "Just," he tries. "Like before?" He settles himself, a little damp and more than a little frayed, into that chair across the room; like an actor, Wakatoshi strips down and takes his own place.

The storm outside picks up, throwing itself at the window in waves of frantic pleading. Tobio can hardly hear himself think.

"Kageyama," Wakatoshi says, somewhere under the pulse rabbiting in Tobio's temples; it's white noise, washed away. "Are you okay? Tobio?"

When Tobio looks back at this, he will think _I must have looked ridiculous_.

Right now, Wakatoshi hesitates, then takes two broad steps across the room. Tobio flinches back, scrabbling at the arms of the chair for some futile escape from the walls closing in.

"Tobio," Wakatoshi breathes. "It's me." He drops to his knees, holding his hands out palms-up in some twisted facsimile of a prayer.

It's many suspended moments, sightless with panic, before Tobio sees them for what they are. Returns to himself enough to recognize the left hand whose calluses may as well be a biography. His throat is still knotted shut, but he reaches his right arm out just a little in apology: elbow against armrest, fingertips skimming a broad, warm palm.

Wakatoshi takes his hand, slow, deliberate movements. Turns it over, and smooths a thumb over the reddened half-moons Tobio's gouged out. Something about the tenderness of it twists in Tobio's chest.

"I'm sorry," Tobio whispers. Wakatoshi blinks up at him. Kneeling wide-eyed and unbearably gentle, he looks ten years more vulnerable. There's nothing Tobio can do but press his other hand instinctively to Wakatoshi's face.

He turns his face into the touch, eyelashes skimming Tobio's palm. Tobio lets gravity pull his fingers down, whispering past the corner of soft, chapped lips, the blunt jaw, settling on the junction of neck and shoulder. Wakatoshi tilts his head up a little further, tendons jumping against Tobio's thumb.

He's still bare-chested, Tobio suddenly realizes. Pliant and quiet on his knees, letting Tobio do whatever he wants to him. "I'm sorry," he says again, threaded with terror.

"Don't be," Wakatoshi murmurs. He rocks back to sit on his heels, shuffles a little out of the cradle of Tobio's knees. The distance between them tastes like salvation and loss.

(When Tobio looks back at this, in moments when he's feeling ripe-bruised and indulgent, maybe he'll think _he was kind to me in ways I didn't know I needed_.)

* * *

_custard , sweet and smooth._

Time itself is viscous, Tobio finds. It coats the back of a spoon, the roof of his mouth; slips down his throat, bridges the space between implement and saucepan in an infinitely thin stream.

Tobio sleeps, and wakes. Sleeps, and wakes. In any given moment, he can conjure up an image of the present: this serve, this stance, this door, this bowl. This instance, held loosely so that he doesn't remember the scent of his sweat or the way his tongue still sits heavy and useless behind his teeth.

It is almost six months before he gains enough clarity to realize he may never have the precision of memory he mistook for a constant before, not again. It is almost twelve before his newly-acquired anger cools.

At eighteen months, Tobio thinks that his body has not failed him, not so completely. In the heat-slick hum of midnight he still presses away from his sheets, drenched and flinching from histories his skin has not forgotten. But his own hands, steadied by the trust of every joyous, soaring teammate he's ever set to, remember other things, too.

* * *

_uova in purgatorio. eggs gently cooked in hellfire-red, bubbling tomatoes._

Some things are new: Wakatoshi is in Poland, and Tobio in Italy, and national borders on this continent give way easily to railroad and adventure. Some things are not: Wakatoshi asks if they can share a meal. Tobio, as he does whenever he can, says yes.

How strange, to begin the journey with a bus ride to Sendai, and meet each other here. Tobio breaks bread to share. It tears apart, crust and chewy core, and it reminds him of nothing at all.

Wakatoshi's gaze is fond. Trusting, anticipatory in a way that softens his eagerness from demand to request. It is a look which says: _I look forward to meeting you, again and again and again_. It says:

 _What will you become tomorrow?_ Shell, white, yolk; chalazae, membranes, blastodisc. Body, mind, spirit.

 _Whole_ , Tobio thinks, _whole_.

**Author's Note:**

> the first lines i wrote in this fic were the last few, long before i read volume 42 and found out that "what will you become tomorrow" is a line with a two-page spread. i read 42 just after i finished this fic and still have no way of explaining this.
> 
> this fic can be retweeted [here](https://twitter.com/emdashing/status/1368058154429349888).


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